Lev Parnas (6 February 1972-) was an American broker and associate of Rudy Giuliani who, alongside Igor Fruman, was a central figure of the 2019 Trump-Ukraine scandal.
Biography[]
Lev Parnas was born in Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union on 6 February 1972, and his family emigrated to Detroit, Michigan when he was three. He was raised in Brooklyn, New York City, and he worked at Kings Highway Realty before moving to Florida in 1995 and becoming a broker with a long trail of debts. In 2019, he worked as a translator for the Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, and he and Igor Fruman also became employees of Donald Trump's right-hand man Rudy Giuliani, who sent the two to Ukraine in late 2018 to find damaging information on Trump's rivals. The two of them also played key roles in the firing of Marie Yovanovitch as the US ambassador to Ukraine. On 9 October 2019, Parnas and Fruman were arrested at Dulles International Airport before they could leave on a one-way trip to Hungary, and they were charged with seeking damaging information on Trump's rivals and for engineering Yovanovitch's firing.